Law opposed Asquith’s Home Rule proposals with characteristic vigour. He declared that forcing a Home Rule bill ‘through the back door’ of the 1911 Parliament Act had no popular mandate – an election on the issue must be called. Law believed the Tories could win that contest against a fragile Liberal government by appealing to the traditionally anti-Irish British electorate. Asquith had no appetite for another election, so he ignored Law and introduced his Home Rule Bill, without making any special provision for the north-eastern Protestant minority. If the bill reached the statute book the Ulster Protestants would have to participate in an autonomous Dublin parliament, which would replace some of the old British colonial administration. The absence of any clause in the bill relating to the Ulster Protestants suggested that Asquith and Redmond underestimated the ferocity of Ulster Unionist and Tory opposition.
After the bill was introduced, Law excited popular Unionist anger outside parliament. In a series of public speeches in England and north-east Ireland, he declared that he could ‘imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster will not go, in which I shall not be ready to support them’. If that was not clear enough, he added: ‘We shall use any means … Even if the Home Rule Bill passes through the Commons … there are things stronger than parliamentary majorities.’ This was fighting talk. For the first time since the seventeenth century, a British politician was openly inciting extra-parliamentary violence against the elected government of the United Kingdom. Nor was Law alone in making incendiary statements. Carson vowed that Unionists would ‘break every law’ if the bill were passed, while Tory MPs and ‘die-hard’ peers spoke of Ulster’s ‘moral right to resist’. Such inflammatory rhetoric provoked consternation among the Liberals. Asquith condemned Law’s statements as ‘a complete grammar of anarchy’, while Churchill said the Tories were determined ‘to govern the country whether in office or in opposition’; as they now lacked the Lords’ ‘veto of privilege’, they would do so through the ‘veto of violence’. Law attempted to use the royal veto, by which the English monarch could refuse royal assent to parliamentary bills. But King George, annoyed by Unionist intransigence, declined to exercise the veto, and nor would he dissolve parliament to force an election.
In truth, the Unionists in north-east Ulster needed little incitement from Law to rebel against Asquith’s bill. In 1912 the paramilitary Ulster Volunteers were established, and the following year these volunteers were organized into the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). Membership was limited to 100,000 men prepared to ‘defend’ the four north-eastern counties from Home Rule, with force if necessary. In 1914 they collaborated with the Ulster Unionist Council in an operation which saw 25,000 rifles smuggled into the north-east of Ireland from the German Empire. The British government did nothing to stop the gunrunning, and a new, militaristic chapter opened in Irish politics.
In response to the establishment of the Ulster Volunteers, Irish nationalists from organizations such as the Gaelic League, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the political party Sinn Féin and the Irish Republican Brotherhood formed the Irish Volunteers. While some Protestants joined, the majority of recruits were Catholic. Irish nationalism, and even Irish separatism, had flourished in the previous two decades among people disenchanted by the failure of conventional politicians to deliver Home Rule. The principal aim of the Volunteers was ‘to secure and maintain the rights and liberties common to the whole people of Ireland … without distinction of creed, politics or social grade’. Their manifesto implied that, if all else failed, those rights and liberties could be maintained by arms. In July 1914, 1,500 rifles were brought from Germany into Howth, near Dublin, for the Irish Volunteers, whose membership had swelled to 200,000 people.
In the meantime, the Third Home Rule Bill slowly worked its way through the Commons, but was then rejected by the Lords. According to the 1911 Parliament Act, a bill could only become law without the consent of the Lords if it passed three times through the Commons in successive parliaments. This guaranteed its passage would be prolonged, and Law made sure there would be many additional delays along the way. Law and Carson also used the interval to foment Unionist rebellion, and to threaten the Liberal government with armed rebellion once again. ‘Do you plan to hurl the full majesty and power of the law,’ Law asked Asquith, ‘supported on the bayonets of the British Army, against a million Ulstermen marching under the Union Flag and singing ‘God Save The King’? Would the Army hold? Would the British people – would the Crown – stand for such a slaughter?’
While Asquith was not prepared to send the army into the north-east of Ireland to impose Home Rule, he did look to the armed forces for help in opposing the UVF. In March 1914, British intelligence reported that the Ulster Protestant organization was about to seize ammunition from various army buildings; there were even rumours of an imminent coup in Ulster and of a march on Dublin. The Liberal government issued an order for partial mobilization to the officers at the Curragh Camp in Kildare, the largest British army base in Ireland, yet many of them refused and threatened to resign in protest. Some soldiers believed that Irish Home Rule might undermine Britain’s Protestant empire, while others acted on the instigation of military officials in London with links to Law. The Unionist leader approved of their rebellion, arguing that all British citizens had the right to choose sides in what was effectively a civil war.
The so-called ‘Curragh Mutiny’ was the first time the British army had refused to follow a government order since the seventeenth century. An appalled King George thought the reputation of his army tarnished; the entire system of British governance in Ireland seemed on the point of collapse. The Liberal administration chose not to reprimand the mutineers, preferring to pretend that the affair had never happened. It was now obvious that Home Rule would not be implemented in the four north-eastern counties. The Ulster Unionists drew the moral that they were untouchable, while the Irish Volunteers concluded that they needed more weapons, since the British army would defend neither them nor the Liberal government’s Home Rule Bill.
Asquith and Redmond finally realized that the Tory-backed Unionists in Ulster were not bluffing. They would have to seek a compromise over the terms of Home Rule. Behind-the-scenes negotiations took place between Law, Carson, Asquith and Redmond. The prime minister raised the possible exclusion of the four Protestant-majority counties of north-east Ulster from the Home Rule Bill, but Carson insisted that the two Ulster counties with small nationalist majorities should also be exempt. Redmond rejected this notion and threatened to remove the IPP’s support from the government if it were pursued. A stalemate followed. With the Home Rule Bill almost on the statute book, Ireland was on the brink of bloody civil war.
But even though the Home Rule Bill did become law in the summer of 1914, no rifles were fired in Ulster. The sudden outbreak of war on the Continent drew the attention of all parties away from Ireland. The implementation of the bill was officially postponed until the end of the European conflict, with Asquith assuring the Unionists that he would consider amending it before it went into full effect. In return the Unionists agreed to postpone arguments over Ireland in the interests of national unity. The prime minister congratulated himself on his narrow escape: ‘the one bright spot,’ he commented in the summer of 1914, ‘was the settlement of Irish civil strife’. But strife in Ireland had merely been postponed.